Mammoth "luau-style"

[Jiri] Svoboda, a professor at the University of Brno and director of its Institute of Archaeology, and colleagues recently excavated Pavlov VI, where they found the remains of a female mammoth and one mammoth calf near a 4-foot-wide roasting pit. Arctic fox, wolverine, bear and hare remains were also found, along with a few horse and reindeer bones.

The meats were cooked luau-style underground. Svoboda said, "We found the heating stones still within the pit and around."

The assemblage seems ripe for a museum reconstruction. A few years ago, I heard a number of archaeologists express doubt that megafauna like mammoths and rhinos could have been regularly hunted by Upper Paleolithic people. The phrase “a hunt they would tell their grandchildren about” is one that I remember.

The last few years have brought a lot more hunting-centric perspective. Neandertals hunted rhinoceros at several sites, along with mammoth and sometimes bear. So I suppose when people think about the Upper Paleolithic, they feel like they can step it up a notch.

John Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I work on the fossil and genetic record of human evolution (About me).

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